7/23/2023 0 Comments Ray charles blind![]() Charles (he dropped the Robinson to avoid being confused with Sugar Ray Robinson) compensated with his hearing, experiencing more in his head than most people do in the sighted world.Īt the State School for Deaf and Blind Children in St. This is a man who could sing a summons and make you plead guilty.īut Ray Charles took his time finding that voice.īorn Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Ga., 56 years ago, he was blinded by glaucoma at age 6. Yet no singer has ever dipped into so many seemingly disparate pop styles while not only maintaining his unique voice but becoming the most influential vocalist of his era.īy now we've grown accustomed to Charles' grace - the supple melismas and swooping inflections, the gutty slurs, exuberant shouts and shimmering whispers, the instinctive phrasing and sheer emotional commitment that give his lyric interpretations more feeling, if not always more meaning, than most other singers even dream of. In trying to define soul, Ray Charles ended up defining himself.īecause he's inhabited a style and sound that he defined - and that defined him, because he's made no radical departures in 20 years - Ray Charles is often misunderstood and consistently underrated. Soul is a way of life - but it is always the hard way." "The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you've been and what it means. "It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room," he said. Even when he's tackled lesser material - and some people think he's done that all too often over the last 20 years - Charles still taps an emotional reserve that even he has never been able to define, though he came close in a 1968 Time magazine cover story: ![]() It's impossible to think about American music since 1950 without hearing that sweetly coarse voice singing such signature tunes as "Georgia on My Mind," "What'd I Say," "I Can't Stop Loving You," "Hit the Road Jack," "Hallelujah, I Love Her So," "Drown in My Own Tears," "You Don't Know Me," "Crying Time" and, in recent years, "America the Beautiful."Ĭharles, who will tonight be a recipient of a 1986 Kennedy Center Honor, along with Lucille Ball, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Antony Tudor and Yehudi Menuhin, is America's quintessential soul singer and has been since he established the mold more than three decades ago. While we admire Brother Ray's tenacity and courage in battling blindness and racism (which are, after all, much the same thing), overcoming two decades of drug addiction and establishing genuine artistic independence, what we return to time and again is that immediately accessible, elastic, ecstatic voice. The Liberty Bell never rang any truer than Ray Charles' voice.
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